1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an information processing apparatus that can recognize a user operation.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional apparatus can detect a hand area that includes a user's hand from an image captured by a visible light camera or an infrared ray camera and can recognize a gesture operation based on the movement and the position of the detected hand. The above-mentioned conventional apparatus can recognize a gesture operation performed against the apparatus and identify an instruction content based on a comparison between a user's hand movement that can be recognized by chasing the hand area and various gesture patterns registered beforehand in association with respective instruction contents. To identify a portion to be compared with a gesture pattern, in the hand movement that occurs in the angle of view of the visible light camera or the infrared ray camera, it is general to start chasing the hand area (start recognizing the gesture operation) when the hand enters a specific area.
As discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-216955, when a user performs a gesture operation, it is conventionally known to set a specific area to be used to recognize the gesture operation in the vicinity of a region where a hand is possibly present, based on at least one of a horizontal width, a vertical length, and an area of a human face portion extracted from a moving image. The specific area to be set to recognize a gesture is referred to as a gesture recognition area.
The gesture recognition area is required to be sufficiently large to accommodate all of hand movements sequentially occurring during the gesture operation. On the other hand, if the gesture recognition area is excessively large, the user is required to perform an exaggerated action to remove the hand from the gesture recognition area before starting the next gesture operation.
In particular, when the user performs a gesture operation that relates to a target object (e.g., a virtual object or a physical object), the size of the range in which the user moves the hand tends to be influenced by the size of the target object. Accordingly, the user's exaggerated action to be performed to return to an initial state may be recognized as an unnatural movement. The operability decreases significantly.
According to the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-216955, at the present position of the user, it is feasible to set a gesture extraction area that is comparable to an area in which each user's hand is possibly present. However, the size of an area that is suitable for each gesture operation to be performed is not taken into consideration.